Optimize your PPC campaign setup to prevent a $1,000 mistake

Pay Per click (PPC) marketing have been proven to assist in acquiring new customers, generating leads, building up sales or creating brand awareness. The benefits of PPC marketing can be attributed to consumers who searched on Google/Bing and have the intent to buy, or contact you to take the next step.

Apart from the qualified traffic, PPC have many other benefits. First off, it is easy to launch a PPC campaign. Establishing an account is simple as it takes a few clicks and a credit card. Secondly, PPC gives one flexibility. Testing creative from ad copy, headlines and promotions are easily to achieve.

However, the simplicity of setting up a PPC account does bring challenges and risk. With more businesses turning to PPC advertising, the paid search space is becoming competitive. More and more brands are fighting for the top ad position. Because your competitors are bidding on some of the same keywords as you are, this could result in a price war. Keywords which once cost a few cents a click, now can cost considerably more. This isn’t a problem if you have a large budget to work with, but if you have a limited budget you will need to keep an eye out on your account spend.

I know of a PPC program that was managed by an inexperience business owner and due to the inexperience, he paid for it dearly.

Real Experience
Company: Online pet supply company
Goal: Generate e-Commerce sales via PPC
Results: Managed to drive lots of clicks to the website, but it was not the desired target customer. The company started a PPC account, setup the keywords in the campaign and then loaded the creative. Unaware that the term “Cricket” is also a game enjoyed by millions, they setup a campaign with terms like ‘Cricket’ and ‘live cricket’. Coincidentally, the Cricket World Cup was played that weekend. Within 3 days, that company spent over $2,000 and did not generate a single sale from all those clicks as the people who clicked on the ads were looking for live cricket matches.
Quick solution: The business owner could have used negative match to omit his ads from showing, also used budget caps, and setup alert notifications. 

So how do you stick to your budget and still get the most out of your PPC ads? Here are 5 tips to better optimize your PPC budget:

	Campaign and Ad Group Setup The foundation of a successful PPC program lies in the way a program is setup. Bucket your keywords in verticals, or groups that make sense to your business, or even your website structure. There is no magic bullet setup that will fit every business, so find a systematic method that will work best for you.
	Creative Pull and Push Make your creative as compelling and informative as possible. You are competing for eyeballs and to attract those potential buyers to your website. Give them a compelling reason to click on your ad as opposed to your competitors – Pull them to your site! At the same time, you want to push away the non-qualified individuals that are just browsers and that will cost you money.
	Match IT!  Search engine tools have come a long way and there are numerous ways to match your ad with the right audience. Most engines have a variation of these matching options such as Broad, Negative, Phrase, Exact match. Utilizing these matching options to your keywords will help control searches that will trigger your ad to appear.
	Monitor & Measure Never launch and forget. Setup a schedule to check in on what you have live, especially the campaigns that you just launched. Some of the KPI you want to keep an eye on are, ROI (conversion), cost, CTR, impression, average keyword position. The newer the campaign or ad group, the more frequently you want to check in on it. Here is a useful tip, if you are working on a draft campaign and can’t get the final draft – Pause the campaign first so that you don’t accidentally launched a draft Ad.
	Experiment Paid search engine marketing is not a science and if somebody is telling you otherwise, they are lying. You can rely on statistical data to back up decisions and to identify winning Ads, or creatives but there the results will vary from one advertiser to another and it is a constant battle to experiment to enhance your results. Test and test again.

Learn more about e2 Ideas’ PPC/SEM solution.